Melbourne Compose Thurs Apr 16: Alexey Kotlyarov & Ben Hutchison: User interfaces with Electron, Scala.js & Calico - Part 2

​Melbourne Compose is the monthly in-person meetup for functional programmers in Melbourne, every 3rd Thursday of the month in Carlton.

Our April meeting will be 5:30-8pm Thurs 16th Apr at our regular venue, Activity Room 2 at Kathleen Syme Center in Carlton. Arrive from 5:45 for chat and socialising, session starts 6:30pm. Please RSVP via Luma

Alexey Kotlyarov & Ben Hutchison will continue the topic we started last month: building modern desktop user interfaces (UIs) using Electron web technology, Scala.js, and the Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) library Calico.

​In our March meeting, Alexey Kotlyarov boldly accepted the challenge of plugging his laptop into the big screen, downloading the tutorial Ben developed, and tackling the exercises within:

https://github.com/benhutchison/calico_electron_tutorial

Alexey did an amazing job dusting off his Scala and operating in a new codebase; he was able to get to a running desktop UI within about 20 minutes. We completed exercise 1 and commenced exercise 2 by the end of the session

​This month we will push deeper into the tutorial, building a working file browser using the key FRP building block, Signals, and effectful functional programming in the Typelevel ecosystem. The later exercises demonstrate tackling real-world concerns, including making effectful backend filesystem calls, error handling, managing long-running async processes with state machines, and caching expensive operations.

As always, newcomers are welcome. Reach Ben on 407 990094 if you have trouble accessing the venue.

Hope to see you there :)
-Ben Hutchison & John Walker